Second paragraph of third essay (“The Tudor Court: Dust and Desire”, by Thomas Betteridge):
This discussion is in two parts. The first section will examine a number of mid-Henrician responses to the court, including Wyatt’s courtly lyrics, while the second part will look in detail at the work of Skelton. This chapter will argue that the Henrician court paradoxically exists in its purest state in the work of Skelton before this court starts to emerge as a coherent institution during the 1520s and ’30s. In Magnyfycence and The Bowge of Courte, Skelton creates a Henrician court before the avant la lettre [sic], a spectral court that haunted the real thing, not as a hidden secret but as dust, detritus, as a material reminder of the court’s consistent failure to achieve its fantasy of itself.²
² Slavoj Žižek comments that “object petit a is the reminder that can never be sublated [aufgehoben] in the moment of symbolization. So not only is this reminder not an ‘inner’ object irreducible to external materiality— it is precisely the irreducible trace of externality in the very midst of ‘internality,’ its condition of impossibility (a foreign body preventing the subject’s full constitution) which is simultaneously its condition of possibility. The ‘materiality’ of this reminder is that of the trauma which resists symbolization.” Slavoj Žižek, “Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, please!” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 2000), 90-135, 117, emphasis in the original.
A collection of essays on how the court actually functioned under the Tudor monarchs, apparently papers from a conference in 2004. The two editors and the other six contributors are all English literature scholars, and I must say I find it interesting that I’m getting quite a lot of value from the literature end of analysis of the Tudor period. The first three essays are about Henry VIII and humanism as deployed at court; the other five are about Elizabeth I, and the standout for me was Peter Sillitoe’s piece on the royal progresses, both their limitations and their achievements in terms of projecting royal power. But there is lots of other good stuff to chew on. No mention of Ireland though. You can get it here (for a price).
